Quick Note: After posting we found a data set that included the 2012-13 season and draft stats. When we updated with these numbers, FSU made a leap to a .55 Pearson’s r. Essentially, FSU was an outlier until last season.

During the initial round of college football games last weekend, all three of Florida’s major programs won their season openers. As I was in the midst of devouring a salsa-covered chip, a friend announced, in sage-like fashion, that the Gators will “clean up” when the next NFL draft comes around.

Around here we question assumptions with data, and that got me to thinking… I began to wonder…

1) Does a team’s success have an effect on the draft prospects of its players?

2) Are some teams better at converting talented players (draft picks) into wins?

So, I brewed some coffee and dove into the data. I entered the number of draft picks for the Gators, Seminoles and Hurricanes each year in the last ten years and the number of wins in the previous season. I then calculated the Pearson’s r over those years for each team. The Pearson’s r is a convenient little statistical tool that tells us the strength of a relationship between two variables (in this case the number of players drafted and the number of wins). The Pearson’s r may be either positive or negative but will always fall between 0 and 1. In short, the smaller the number, the weaker relationship and the larger the number, the stronger the relationship.

What I found was nothing short of bizarre.

Over the last ten years, the Gators had a moderately strong relationship between wins and draft recruits. The Florida Pearson’s r is .52. The Miami Hurricanes aren’t much different, with a Pearson’s r of .57. This means that when these two teams perform better on the field, their players benefit by having better luck in the NFL draft. But the shocker is Florida State. Their Pearson’s r is .06. This is extremely weak and more or less non-existent. You can see the Pearson’s r comparisons in the graph below.

This lack of a relationship is baffling and means that if the Seminoles perform well, their seniors and juniors are no more likely to be drafted than if the team collapses into a pile of sweat and loses.

For a moment, I suspected this could be explained by the Seminoles’ reputation, so I decided to perform the same calculation on two other historically well performing football teams, the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. This didn’t clear up anything. The Tide had a very strong relationship, with a Pearson’s r of .63. The Fighting Irish had a Pearson’s r of .41. So, the players benefit more from better seasons.

You can check all the data in the interactive table below. If you learned something interesting here today, please share it with your friends.

It is a pilgrimage for many in Florida. Fans heading back to their college towns for the opening game. The energy, the tailgating and of course, the traffic.

One of the most definitive rivalries in Florida is the one between UF and FSU. For those of you sporting “House Divided” décor we wanted to settle a score. What college town has the worst drivers?

We decided to look at the number of traffic accidents in Alachua and Leon counties and compare them to the state of Florida as a whole to find out if what I’m experiencing is something more than happenstance. The figures in the graph below are the ratio of accidents to population.

We found that in Alachua County, you are 25% more likely to be involved in a crash compared to the rest of Florida. But you are even more likely to be heading to the body shop after a visit to ‘Nole Country. In Leon county you are almost 35% more likely to be in an accident compared with the rest of Florida.

So, according to the data, both schools are excellent at producing terrible drivers, but FSU takes the top ranking.

After we posted last week on the relationship between concealed carry permits and violent crime, Greg Newburn of Families Against Mandatory Minimums tweeted to ask about similar data on the policy of “10-20-Life.” You can learn more about this mandatory sentencing policy here.

We did some research and here is what we found:

- Easily accessible public data on Florida firearm crime is not available going back more than a decade. This is unfortunate because 10-20-Life became law in 1998. The bottom line is that we can’t follow the trend all the way back, but we can go back ten years.

- While violent crime in Florida has fallen dramatically over the last decade, gun crime actually spiked in the mid-2000s before falling again in the last few years. In turns out, the trend of using guns for violent crime is a bit disjointed from overall violent crime rates and from the number of concealed carry permits (i.e. more guns possessed by Floridians). Hence, there is no easy connection between overall violence and gun crime or the number of guns and gun crime.

- We can’t make any clear judgments about 10-20-Life without having data from before the policy was enacted. But, you can see the available data for yourself and form your own hypothesis. Ask yourself what trend the overall gun crime rate (purple line on the chart) mirrors. For example, our researcher @mrDanielDean thought gun crime seemed to rise and fall with the economy.

The chart below is interactive- just hover over points to see the data. As always, if you like what you see, please share it!

N.B. If the graphs below do not open in your Twitter browser please open in your phone’s native browser (Safari or Chrome)
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Human existence is driven by assumptions derived from our experiences and patterns that we have observed. These sorts of assumptions are likes rules of thumb that scientists call “heuristics.”

An interesting element of heuristics is that two people can look at the same facts and apply very different judgments about those facts. One example of this is the fact pattern of the Trayvon Martin trial which leads people to one of two very different views on Florida self defense laws.

Now, data science can’t tell us much about the Martin case, but it can give us some insight into the actual relationship between lawfully carried guns and violent crime. The table below shows the total number, net change from the prior year, and percentage change from the prior year of concealed carry permit (CCP) holders and violent crimes in Florida.

We chose to look at the concealed carry permit numbers because it is a rough measure of the number of lawfully owned guns being carried on Florida’s streets. We are looking at the data to see if there is evidence that more people carrying guns in a state with “loose” gun laws results in more or less violent crime.

We have also provided a graph depicting the relationship of concealed carry permits to violent crimes and a graph just depicting the number of violent crimes in Florida each year.

Is the relationship here as clear as it appears? Are other important data not being evaluated? Take some time to look over the data provided below and let others know what you see via social media. You will be surprised on the diversity of opinions on just this one simple data set.

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Decision MediaWorks

Decision MediaWorks specializes in turning data into insight. We use the latest in data science to bring clarity to the hard choices made by anyone who follows Florida's unique politics, public policy and culture.

Our focus is on delivering insights that make sense out of publicly available data. We believe the success of any data science project rests on the ability to clearly communicate insights to decision makers.

Questions answered. Tough decisions made easier. That's what we do.

About Joe Clements

Joe Clements, President

Joe's first foray in analytics was estimating the amount of carbon stored in one acre of Ethiopian scrub brush as an intern for the United Nations World Food Programme.

After working for several years in political campaigns and as a legislative staffer, Joe saw that decision making is hard but that good data science (and the presentation of data) can make many decisions easier.

Joe was a Truman and Rhodes scholar nominee at the University of North Florida where he graduated with a degree in public relations. He is currently completing graduate coursework in political management and computer science at Florida State University.

In his non-data science life, Joe is married to Sara, fosters dogs, shoots guns, never misses a Jacksonville Jaguars game and tries to play golf.